THE POETRY REVIEW

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

September 1912

(pages 430-432)

CRITICISM.

THE POETIC DRAMA: CONSIDERED IN FOUR ARTICLES.

The Editor of the Poetry Review has sent me the following plays by way of assisting me in my quest for dramatists: The Countess Cathleen and The land of Heart's Desire, by W. B. Yeats (Unwin). Three Allegorical Plays, by W. A. B. (Dent). Mortaldello, by Aleister Crowley (Wieland). The Tragedy of Amy Robsart, by Harold Hardy (Banks). The King, by Stephen Phillips (Swift), and The Bride of Dionysus, by R. C. Trevelyan (Longmans).

     [ . . . ]

Years ago The Land of Heart's Desire invaded the London theatre. Then Mr. Yeats took a dislike to it and revised it considerably before it was allowed to find its place in the higher regions of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It is true drama:

Thus do the spirits of evil snatch their prey

Almost out of the very hand of God.

The conflict ends, as human conflict ever ends, in irony, food for tears and sweet laughter, the very stuff on which our imagination feeds. In what other writer in English for the theatre, now that Synge is gone, shall you find, or, what is more lamentable, the will to seek it? The will, perhaps, is to be found in Mr John Drinkwater and Mr Lascelles Abercrombie, in Mr John Masefield and Mr Wilfrid Gibson. The young men in Ireland, Lennox Robinson, St John Ervine, T. C. Murray, seem to be groping in realism for it. The writers here directly under consideration—Mr Crowley, Mr Harold Hardy, W.A.B., Mr Trevelyan, and Mr Stephen Phillips—fumble after it, and their productions are only nephews à la mode de Bretagne, first cousins once removed, of poetry and drama.

First of all to consider Mr. Crowley, an amazing creature. He refuses to be taken seriously. His bloodthirsty, lecherous play he calls a comedy. It is a riotous farce. Intoxication—of blood, of words, of hysteria, of lust—takes the place of imagination. The play is exciting, but most amusing in its invective:

Thou puny, puking patch,

White-livered, yellow-bellied wittol!

There are at least a hundred lines like that, and au fond, they are the most serious in the play, because the most sincere. At the beginning of the second act there is a couplet for which I am very grateful. It is one which all good critics—all writers indeed—should take to heart:

Now then to sound the core of the apple of our plot,

Sweet as it was before, there’s such a thing as rot.

There is; and there has never yet lived a man incapable of writing it, not even Shakespeare's self, or Goethe, or Shelley. The truth is, I think, that only very little of any man’s work can rank as positive achievement, and it is the business of the critic to sift that little from the “rot.” There is not a critic with health or leisure enough to perform that office for Mr. Crowley. He has talent, scores of talents, but, seemingly, no power to use, discipline, or develop them. It would be splendid to take him seriously, but then—one cannot. He has abundant humour—a most necessary ingredient in a poet’s composition—but that, too, is untamed.

—Gilbert Cannan